THE VISIONARY VOICE OF MICHAEL RICHARDS

alex fialho and melissa levin, Exhibition Curators

Michael Richards: Are You Down? is the first museum retrospective of Michael Richards’s artwork, exhibiting both his extensive sculpture and drawing practice.

Of Jamaican and Costa Rican lineage, Richards was born in Brooklyn in 1963, raised in Kingston, and came of age between postindependence Jamaica and post–civil rights era America. Richards used the language of metaphor to investigate racial inequity and the tension between assimilation and exclusion in his art. Integral to a generation of Black artists emerging in the 1990s, his artwork gestures toward both repression and reprieve from social injustices and the simultaneous possibilities of uplift and downfall, often in the context of the historic and ongoing oppression of Black people.

In a 1997 interview, Richards stated, “I think history has always been important to me because if you examine the past you can also read the symptoms of what is prevalent now in terms of racial associations and the relationships of power present in our society today. History is interesting in terms of how we mythologize it, how we accept history or interpretations of history as fact, and whose interpretation it is. In many ways my history is so different from the official white versions.”

Significant points of reference for Richards include the Tuskegee Airmen—the first African American pilots in US military history—and the complexity of their triumphs in the face of segregation. This is especially evident in his sculpture Tar Baby vs. St. Sebastian, which has been on continuous display at the NCMA since 2003. For this work Richards cast his body in resin, outfitted the figure as a World War I Tuskegee Airman, pierced its torso with miniature airplanes, and painted it golden bronze. Life-size and levitating amidst bombardment, the figure appears both peaceful and pained. More generally, flight and aviation were central themes for Richards as an exploration of freedom and escape, ascendance and descent.

Other important influences include cultural, religious, and ritual stories from African, African American, Jamaican, and Christian traditions, as well as Greek mythology. Richards merged worlds in his artworks, bringing together spiritual and historical references with popular culture. His recurring interest was in both the everyday and the transcendent and how bringing them into conversation with each other opens up a plurality of representation and interpretation. Centering his own experience, Richards used his body to cast his figures, which often appear as pilots, saints, or both.

Tragically, Richards passed away on September 11, 2001, while working in his Lower Manhattan Cultural Council World Views studio on the 92nd floor of World Trade Center, Tower One.

At age 38 Richards was an emerging artist whose incisive aesthetic held immense promise to make him a leading figure in contemporary art.

Michael Richards: Are You Down? takes its name from one of the last artworks Richards created. Consisting of three identical downed pilots cast from the artist’s body, Are You Down? is a complex homage to the Tuskegee Airmen. These heroes are rendered on the ground, and one has to look down or get down to engage them. Speaking to the pilot imagery in his work, Richards noted, “The pilots serve as a symbol of failed transcendence and lost faith, escaping the pull of gravity but always forced back to the ground, lost navigators seeking home.”

The retrospective features nearly all the artwork Richards made during a prolific decade of production between 1990 and 2001. It includes numerous sculptures and drawings as well as documentation of site-specific installations and images of no longer extant work. Several of Richards’s sculptures have been recently conserved and are on view for the first time since the artist’s passing.

Specifically included at the NCMA are materials and documentation from the exhibition Defying Gravity: Contemporary Art and Flight, which took place at the Museum in 2003 and marked the centennial of the Wright brothers’ first flight in North Carolina. Defying Gravity included Tar Baby vs. St. Sebastian and Winged and initiated the relationship between Richards and the NCMA. Curator Linda Dougherty’s conversations with the artist started before he passed, and the exhibition opened two years later.

Inextricably connected to the moment of its making in the 1990s, Richards’s work engaging Blackness, flight, diaspora, spirituality, police brutality, and monuments remains timely and resonant decades after its creation.